Reading real cartridges (Update - IT LIVES! - video)

[Box]

So, crazy idea... In your final board with connector, would it be possible to make it cover the area between the cart connector and the battery compartment and have pads on the back for Gameboy or GBA buttons? Combine that with a 3D printed bracket for the button wells and it could be a pretty slick dual purpose board.

[Billy Blaze]

So, crazy idea... In your final board with connector, would it be possible to make it cover the area between the cart connector and the battery compartment and have pads on the back for Gameboy or GBA buttons? Combine that with a 3D printed bracket for the button wells and it could be a pretty slick dual purpose board.

you mean a little something like this?

GBA Buttons vs. GBZ X+Y ButtonsShow

[abrugsch]

Yes, I'm exactly planning something like that

[Box]

So, crazy idea... In your final board with connector, would it be possible to make it cover the area between the cart connector and the battery compartment and have pads on the back for Gameboy or GBA buttons? Combine that with a 3D printed bracket for the button wells and it could be a pretty slick dual purpose board.

you mean a little something like this?

GBA Buttons vs. GBZ X+Y ButtonsShow

Yep, pretty much! The mounting lugs are already there, so a one piece board would work nicely there.

Also, if used with Kite's AIO board, you would just have to leave off one of the included spacers for his secondary board.

[Box]

Yes, I'm exactly planning something like that

Cool! Are you thinking about connecting it through the camera port, or through the GPIO pins?

[abrugsch]

well GPIO now as the new version is going to be SPI not I2C. I might still do an I2C version to work with the camera port though since that'll be the only way to get it to work with a DPI display like on Kite's AIO, unless I can figure out how to get it to work with DPI 565.

also I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that I might actually have to do this with a MCU via Serial over USB (or uart), but we'll see how the SPI version goes once I get that working (should get some progress with my prototype tonight...)

[abrugsch]

well if I do it on an MCU i was planning on doing uart straight into the pi, not daisy chaining them

at the moment it's:
Pi---[i2c]---> GPIO Port expanders===>Cartridge
next version is:
Pi---[SPI]---> GPIO Port expanders===>Cartridge

If I do MCU it'll be:
Pi---[USB/UART]--->CartSlurp MCU===>Cartridge

what you're suggesting is:
Pi---[USB/UART]--->32U4---[SPI]---{CartSlurp MCU}===> Cartridge
which seems a bit un-necessary.
however once I have the SPI code running I'll see about porting to arduino and then writing a UART Pi layer

[abrugsch]

Yeah but what I'm saying is that if I go down the mcu route I don't need any of the SPI shenanigans. BUT it takes up 28 gpio lines as of now... So if you're using ~18 yourself, that doesn't leave me enough to run alongside does it...
This is all theoretical until I've done my spi experiment anyway. All good fun tho

[abrugsch]

Gah.. Meant one thing. Wrote another. Doh. Anyway, anything involving an mcu is next step. I need to finish the step I'm on first

[abrugsch]

So for those asking about times, I dumped off a pokemon red tonight (a reasonably sized 64 banks or 1 Mb) which took about 3 mins.